Female Fantasy of Male Homosexuality: Queering Boy's Love Fandom on the Chinese Internet

Boy's love (BL in short; danmei in Chinese) is a Japanese term for female-oriented fictional media, which focuses on love, sex and romance between beautiful androgynous boys or young men. Apart from the gay self-representations, BL is a genre of male homoeroticism by and for mostly heterosexual women. In China, the BL fans call themselves "Fu Nu", which means "rotten girl", to describe their enthusiasm for fantasizing male homosexuality. BL originated from Japanese amine, comic and game youth culture, and has since become a transnational phenomenon all over the world with a global fan base. As such, the phenomenon of boy's love had already aroused a lot of discussions in relation to ideologies of gender and sexuality from different cultural and social perspectives. BL fandom in China's culture context with its "Chinese characteristics" also deserves particular attention, when it opens up a fantastic space for Chinese woman to practice their sexuality beyond non-heterosexual norms.;However there is limited work that considers the queer sexuality of female BL fans in China, in relation to the queer texts and queer discourses they create. There is also little research that explores the capacity of boy's love netizens to resist the on-going internet surveillance by the Chinese government of information deemed 'sexually inappropriate' and outside the heterosexual norm. Therefore there remains a paucity of studies that examine the political potentialities of anti-homophobic and queer discourses of sexuality as manoeuvred by the Chinese BL fan base that continue to populate online communities. Based on previous studies about the phenomenon of boy's Love in China, this paper analyses the queer politics of the online BL fandom in terms of the interactions between BL and the other gender and sexuality discourses on the Chinese Internet. It will be argued that the online BL fandom opens up a virtual space for girls and young women to author practice their male homosexual fantasies. Moreover, it will be maintained that boy's love appropriates the queerness from the different sides of cyber culture into its narrative fantasies, thus forming a queer continuum made up with the conflicts, complicities and political potentialities of the gender and sexuality on the Chinese internet. This paper concludes with an analysis of the ambiguous relation of BL with Chinese Internet censorship, and traces the capacities of boy's love netizens in subverting and resisting government surveillance of what it terms 'obscene' information.